The surviving camp inmates of the Banja Luka Region and the families of those killed today marked the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the closure of the “Omarska” camp, through which more than 3,300 Bosniaks and Croats passed from May 25 to August 30, 1992, of which, according to the association’s data, 700 killed.
“I was sentenced to death with five other women, but I survived and today I am the only one alive among those women. We must live, come and talk, tell the truth about what happened here. The most serious crimes and tortures took place,” said Sabiha Turkanovic from Kozarac.
“‘Omarska’ was not a place where inmates were sporadically treated cruelly or where living conditions were simply difficult. It was a hellish environment where men and women were deprived of the most basic necessities of life and humanity. Omarska was a place where people were beaten daily and with diabolical means of torture. No one could be under the illusion that ‘Omarska’ was just a poorly run prison – it was a criminal enterprise that worked deliberately, in a way that destroyed the mind, body and spirit of the people who were there were detained”, it is stated in one of the judgments of the Hague Tribunal, in the case “Kvocka and others”, it was pointed out at today’s gathering in Omarska.
“The crimes were systematically planned, organized and carried out. Here we have an imitation of 432 tombstones for camp inmates who were killed here. And camp inmates from Omarska were also taken to other locations and killed,” said Mirsad Duratovic, president of the Association of camp inmates of the Banja Luka.
Nijaz Mujkanovic from Kozarac is the last inmate who left Omarska on August 22, 1995. The memories, he says, still hurt just as much.
“You don’t know what every night brings, roll call, when you are called, take your things and go, it means that you are gone. Like in Auschwitz, we had a white and a red house. White for torture, and no one came back from the red,” Nijaz Mujkanovic, who translated his difficult experiences into the book Premeditated Crime, which was translated into English, French and Swedish.
At the beginning of August 1992, well-known American and British journalists Roy Gutman, Penny Marshall, Ed Vulliamy and Ian Williams discovered the Prijedor camps, after which their dissolution began.
The first trial and the first verdict before the Hague Tribunal were precisely for the crimes committed in this camp. Due to the mass rape in this camp of imprisoned female inmates, rape was characterized as a war crime for the first time in judicial practice.
About 6,000 people from Prijedor of non-Serb nationality were imprisoned in the “Omarska” camp, while about 700 of them were killed. There were also 37 women in the camp, and five of them did not leave the camp alive. There were also 28 minors in the camp.
Some of the inmates of the “Omarska” camp were killed at Koricanske stijene, some at Hrastova glavica, and many succumbed to torture.
The “Omarska” camp, like the “Keraterm” and “Trnopolje” camps, was formed on May 26, 1992 by decision of the Crisis Staff of the then Prijedor municipality.
